Hard Drive, driving me nuts

[barryland]

I have a 7200 Maxtor 40g hd.
Last week I strted to experience longer access times when using my hd. I use a dual boot system (XP & Mandrake 9.0) but after rebooting one night I got the message from windows that ntoskernl.exe is corrupt, (or something very similar) about half-way through the boot process.
I attempted to revert to earlier settings that worked but the same message came up.
I then tried to implement a repair but it kept crashing after the initial file copying section of the XP installation process.
Then I took the drive out of that box and put it in another box. The drive posted fine and was visible to XP but when I attempted to access the drive it appeared to be empty. I gave up on my data and steeled myself to a complete format only to find that windows would get about 90% of the way through the format before delivering the message that it was unable to complete the format.
Much finagling later I installed Partition Magic Pro and used that to delete my linux partitions (sob) and my windows partition (alas, all that hard-acquired porn). After the format I ran scandisk which reported no errors.
Everything seemed to go okay. XP re-installed. Then I restarted and I got another error message. The system would not boot.

Sorry 'bout the long message but I need help and this is everything that has happened. Is my hd flatlined?

[Dubber]

The drive may be a toast, but B4 coming to that conclusion, I'd try a Win98 boot disk and deleting partitions using fdisk, recreating and formating.

Also, try low level formatting:
http://www.disk-utility.com/hard-disk-low-level-format.html

[deadmonty]

Possibly a boot sector virus?

[miketree]

Possibly a boot sector virus?

if so, run fdisk /mbr

[mrtristan]

Sounds very much like your hard drive is about to die. It might also be your power supply, but you had problems in both, so I would say that it's most likely your hard drive.

It's a pain in the ass, but Maxtor has a three year warranty. You can check the validity online, but you need to call to obtain an RMA. You should also download and execute their PowerMax utility and run it to see if it can tell you exactly what's wrong with the drive.

The tech gave me a little bit of a hard time, because I didn't run their crappy software.